Choosing Darkness

Looking in I can see the light, a sliver, the type that comes from an open doorway, it’s right at my finger tips. But instead I look back, into the darkness, unsure if I should move forward or stay here.

In today’s meditation and journey I asked for a message, like I always do and that is what I was shown. The darkness versus the light. In all aspects of life we have the shadow and the dawn. Both important aspects on this journey of reclaiming who we are.

For a long time I simply choose the light, make it better, be happy, put a smile on my face because that’s what people want to see, no one cares about what’s going on with me, you or anyone else. I took the phrases of “no one cares, so don’t tell people your problems” to heart – too much to heart. My best friends, the people closest to me in life had no idea what I was experiencing and I couldn’t ask for help.

I just bandaged everything. Acted like it was fine and pushed it away. But doing that actually caused the darkness to grow – that place inside of me where I stored everything took not just the stuff that I put there but all the things I wanted to keep as well.

Because as long as we have this big bag of stuff inside of us that we’re not dealing with it becomes a black hole and that gets heavy, it creates and influences who we become, how we act, what we choose.

We tell ourselves we’re choosing the light way, the right way but in fact we’re choosing the darkness. Our refusal to look at it or to work through it feeds the darkness by letting it stay inside of us, by letting it grow for adding more and more things to it because it changes us – those things that we don’t deal with.

We become someone we’re not really, someone who reacts to things instead of responding to them, someone who is impacted by everything outside of us and cannot self regulate and takes everything personally, adding more and more to this ever growing pile of darkness inside of us.

But the light is always there, the real light, not a fake one by bandaiding anything but a real deep healing that comes when we allow our darkness, our pain to teach us. When we’ve been a certain way for so long it’s hard to move forward, to see the sliver of light and step into it.

It’s the unknown and most people have a high certainty – to know what is on the other side of the lighted doorway. What if opening causes more pain? What if I don’t know how to be? What if I can’t handle it? There are more questions that answers when we stand in the darkness, a place we know well and see the light ahead, desperately craving but it also scared of it.

The darkness you’ve known well, this way of being, reacting and showing up in life. It’s not easy to step into the light, unsure if you deserve it, unsure if you want it when all you’ve known is how you are now, how you have been.

Standing between worlds – unsure of which move to make, being called to the light – to let it wash it over you, to choose a new way of living or to let the darkness pull you back in, keeping you safe in it’s embrace for longer still – reminding you of why you created this space in the darkness, all the ways you can be hurt, that people don’t love you or don’t care.

Everyday you get to choose – to step into the unknown of the light, to let the light in so it can shine into the darkness and help us release the experiences, the shadows, the habits and patterns we have developed or we can choose to be our darkness, our shadow.